Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called “The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains, trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer. This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will replace the chaparejos and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being carried in the boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the pack-train.

Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion, you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would? I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the wheat-field—the Pioneers.

There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune Cache to Fort George; or from the country of the Kootenai overland through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the Imperial Limited goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness begins.

What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail, passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser. Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace “jerky” to a six-horse Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the Upper Fraser and the Nechako.

The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and, indeed, of all transportation in the British Columbian hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government post-road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the Royal Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the rush to the gold-fields on Williams Creek. Starting from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two hundred and twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where it abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus at Barkerville, once a famous mining-camp but now a quiet agricultural community in the heart of the Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of fifteen miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer can obtain surprisingly well-cooked meals at a uniform charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might explain for the benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to twelve and a half cents. For the same price the traveller can get a clean and moderately soft bed, although he must accept it as part and parcel of frontier life should he find that the room to which he is assigned already contains half a dozen snoring occupants. These rest-houses, which, with their out-buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely of logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and occasionally surrounded by stockades and constantly reminded me of the post stations which marked the end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road before Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. During the summer months the “up journey” of three hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars, stage-coaches, and river boats, and, if the roads are dry, is made in about four days. As a one-way ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, thus making it one of the most expensive journeys of its length in the world, being even costlier, if I remember rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian railway from Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of the fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a picturesqueness, an excitement, which cannot be duplicated on this continent. From the moment that you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft until your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert Harbour, southward bound, you are seeing with your own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, a nation in the cellar-digging stage of its existence; you are transported for a brief time to the Epoch of the Dawn.

In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we expected to encounter, I had had the car fitted with shock-absorbers and had brought with me from Vancouver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft we selected an equipment with as great care as though we were starting on an East African safari. A pick, a long-handled shovel, a pair of axes, a block and tackle, four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised the essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel a supply of tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of rubber sheets, and three of the largest-size Hudson Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this motoring in lands where motors have never gone before. The most important thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, the entire success of our venture depending upon our ability to carry a sufficient supply with us to get us through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing our personal belongings to a minimum, we succeeded in getting eight five-gallon tins into the tonneau of the car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically at least, should have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, it did not suffice to carry us half-way to the Skeena, so slow was the going and so terrible the condition of the road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an order from a British development company on its agents at several points in the interior, instructing them to supply us with gasoline from some drums which had been taken in at enormous expense a year or so before in a futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we should have been compelled to abandon the car in the wilderness for lack of fuel. Gasoline, like everything else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft I paid fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, until we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two dollars a gallon—which, so I was assured, was exactly what it had cost the company to freight it in. Briefly, our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, and follow the Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, thence striking through the unsettled and almost unexplored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to the Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail through Fort Fraser to New Hazleton, on the Skeena, which is barely half a hundred miles south of the Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft as to our chances of getting through, and the more people to whom I talked the slimmer they seemed to become.

One man assured us that there was no road whatever north of Fort Fraser and that, if we wanted to get through, we would have to take the car apart and pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile agent from Seattle had done the year before; another told us that there were no bridges and that we would be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make rafts to ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us up by assuring us that we could always get a team to haul us out.

“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in a fortnight,” he remarked cheeringly.

“What would it cost?” I inquired.

“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at bargaining you ought to get the outfit for about a hundred dollars a day.”

That cheered us up tremendously, of course.

We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn morning. The air was like sparkling Moselle, overhead was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between dun and barren hills, into the unknown. The entire population of the little town had turned out to see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low bonnet of the car pointed northward, they gave us a cheer and shouted after us, “Hope you’ll get through, fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left Seattle I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we flew from a metal rod at the front of the hood, and more than once, when we were mired in the mud below the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready to quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting fluttering bravely before us which spurred us on.

Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern States it would be described by the natives as “a fair to middlin’ road,” and it is all of that and more—in the dry season. When we traversed it, in the early fall, it had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn rains and heavy teaming and was as good a road as an automobile pioneer could ask for. In that journey up the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border life which most people think of as having passed with the pony express and the buffalo. A stage-coach rattled past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet body lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four horses at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash spasmodically between the ears of his leaders, for he carried his Majesty’s mails and must make his six miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the burdened mules plodding by dejectedly, long ears to shaven tails. Scattered along the line, like mounted officers beside a marching column, were the packers: wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the colour of their saddles; picturesque figures in their goatskin chaparejos, their vivid neckerchiefs, and their broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators of the Yukon Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the Groundhog, or, it might be, for the lonely trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake would plod a solitary prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin shirt glazed with grime, his tent, pick, shovel, and his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and Siwash ranchers—for the Indian of British Columbia takes more kindly to an agricultural life than do his brothers on the American side of the border—gaily clad squaws and bright-eyed children peering curiously at our strange vehicle from beneath the canvas covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to barter the produce of their holdings in the back country for cartridges, red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a phonograph.

But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their six and eight and twelve horse teams straining at the huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the freight trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear a marked resemblance to the prairie-schooners of crossing-the-plains days, the British Columbian freight wagons are barely half as large as the enormous scow-bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked westward. Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated for, however, by the custom of linking them in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt to negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with vehicles having an unusually long wheel-base is but to invite disaster. In freighting parlance, five wagons with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers are known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the outfit is the “swing boss.” To meet one of these wagon-trains on a road that was uncomfortably narrow at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the freighter is always permitted to take the inside of the road, so that more than once we were compelled to pull so far to the outside, in order to give the huge vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between our outer wheels and the precipice’s brink for a starved greyhound to pass.

The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more infrequent become the mails, until, north of the Fraser, the settlers receive their letters and newspapers only once a month during the summer and frequently not for many months on end when the rains have turned the trails into impassable morasses. When we left Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible condition that the driver of the mail-stage would not even hazard a guess as to when he could start. At frequent intervals along the way men were camping in the rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection save the scant shelter afforded by a dog-tent or a bit of canvas stretched between two trees. At the sound of our approach they would run out and hail us and inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell them when the mail was likely to be along. These men were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the wilderness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that road for many days, straining their ears to catch the rattle of the wheels which would bring them word from the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut, clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside the road in a little shelter tent, told us that he had been there for fifteen days waiting for the postman.

“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,” he explained, “and I was so afraid that I might miss the mail that I tramped out and have been sleeping here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the kiddies are back in the old country, in Devonshire, waiting until I can get a home for them out here. I haven’t had a letter from them now for going on seven weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little girl was sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s bad news that the coach hasn’t started yet. I guess the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”

To such men as these I lift my hat in respect and admiration. Resolute, patient, persevering, facing with stout hearts and smiling lips all the hardships and discouragements that such a life has to bring, they are the real advance-guards of progress, the skirmishers of civilisation. In Rhodesia, the Sudan, West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping down the rivets of empire.

A great deal has been written about the brand of Englishman who goes by the name of remittance-man. With a few pounds a month to go to the devil on, he haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, working when he must, idling when he may. In Cape Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne, Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished bars, or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. As his long-suffering relatives generally send him as far from home as they can buy a ticket, he has become a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed in well-cut tweeds or flannels and smoking the inevitable brier, you can see him at almost any hour of any day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the Empress Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the Union Club. But you rarely find him in the British Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he ain’t a worker” and in consequence is cordially detested by the native-born no less than by those industrious settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out to his labour in the morning he is counted an undesirable addition to the population. Hence, though the hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack, comparatively few of them bear the despised label of remittance-man.

But that is not saying that you do not find numbers of well-bred, well-educated young Englishmen chopping out careers for themselves up there in the forests of the North. We came across two such at a desolate and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel and Blackwater, three hundred miles from the nearest railway and thirty from the nearest house. We stopped at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed us as they would a certified cheque. One of them, I learned after considerable questioning, was the nephew of an earl and had stroked an Oxford crew; the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed me the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house in Hampshire which he called home, and remarked quite casually that he had been something of a cricketer before he came out to the Colonies and had played for the Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two youngsters, gently born and cleanly bred, “pigging it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a one-room cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens! how glad they were to see us—not for our own sakes, you understand, but because we were messengers from that great, gay world from which they had exiled themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, the other fried the bacon—“sow-belly” they called it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of them fired questions at us like shots from an automatic: what were the newest plays, the latest songs, how long since I had been in London, was the chorus at the Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he just a bally ass, did we think that there was anything to this talk about the Ulstermen revolting—and all the other questions that homesick exiles ask.

“What on earth induces you to stay on in this God-forsaken place?” I asked, when at length they paused in their questioning for lack of breath. “No neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a month if you are lucky, rain six months out of the twelve, and snow for four months more. Why don’t you try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t do much more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty poor one at that, eh?”

“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year, now that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get a hundred and fifty.”

“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity in my voice. “Heavens alive, man, what does that amount to?”

“It amounted to something over ten thousand dollars,” he answered. “Up here, you see, hay is a pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred dollars a ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit lonely, of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s all sort of fishin’ and shootin’—there’s a skin of a grizzly that I killed last week tacked up at the back of the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment, “this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’ around London and doin’ the society-Johnnie act. We feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit toward buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”

Though they probably didn’t know it, those two young fellows in flannel shirts and cord breeches, who had evidently left England because they were tired of living à la métronome, because they had wearied of garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, were members in good standing of the Brotherhood of Nation Builders.

Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty gallons of gasoline, the going had been so heavy that by the time we reached the telegraph hut at Bobtail Lake, where the development company of which I have already spoken had left the first of its drums of gasoline, our supply was seriously diminished. These relay telegraph stations are scattered at intervals of fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire, two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City with Vancouver. Many of them are so remotely situated that the only time the operators see a white man’s face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual pack-train brings them their supplies in the spring and fall. I can conceive of no more intolerable existence than the lives led by these men, sitting at deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing under the sun to do save listen to the ceaseless chatter of a telegraph instrument, day after day, week after week, month after month the same. Imagine the monotony of it! There were two young men at the Bobtail Lake hut, an operator and a linesman, and when they saw the little flag of stripes and stars fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their hats and cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered lives in offices or factories or stores, the flag may be nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue bunting, but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where it is rarely seen, it stands for home and country and family and friends, and is reverenced accordingly.

“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,” one of the young men remarked a trifle huskily. “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on it in more’n two years. When we heard you coming through the woods we thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to see an automobile up in this God-forsaken hole.”

“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.

“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee. Used to be a train-despatcher down in Texas, got tired of living in a box car with no trees but sage-brush and no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. And believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country again.”

That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. The English owner and his wife were absent in Vancouver, but the ranch hand in charge of the place was only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house, though built of logs, for up there there is nothing else to build with, was considerably more pretentious than the general run of frontier dwellings. Instead of the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room, it had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone fireplace and the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, and two sleeping rooms, while in front, in pathetic imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums and surrounded by an attempt at a picket fence. The floor of the house was of planks hand-hewn; cedar poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks in the log walls were stuffed with moss and clay and papered over with illustrations torn from the London weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and obviously home-made, with benches instead of chairs, for the freighters, who charge thirty cents a pound for hauling merchandise in from the railway, refuse to bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which require space out of all proportion to their weight. Lying on the table in the living-room, atop of a heap of year-old newspapers and magazines (for in the north country printed matter of any description is something to be read and reread and then read once again before it is passed on to a neighbour) were two much-thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was curious to see what sort of literature would appeal to people who lived their lives in such a place. One was the “Discourses of Epictetus,” the other “Manners and Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter entitled “The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the nearest neighbour, a Swedish rancher with a Siwash wife, lived fifty miles away.

If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the house, or only half as good, there would have been little left to be desired. The ranch hand who was in charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed the information that he had been a British soldier in India before coming to Canada to seek his fortune and wished to God that he was back in India again—made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough soda-biscuits the first of every month to last until the next month came round. As we were there about the twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite hard—like dog-biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; stone-cold boiled potatoes, a pan of the inevitable stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking coffee, which was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? This was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.

I was particularly impressed throughout our journey across British Columbia with the almost paternal interest the provincial government takes in the welfare of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything from the filing of homestead claims to the prevention of forest-fires. Rest-houses are maintained by the government along certain of the less-travelled routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness in every direction; forest-rangers and agricultural experts are constantly riding about the province with open eyes and ears; in every settlement is stationed a government agent from whom the settlers can obtain information and advice on every subject under the sun. Law and order prevail to an extraordinary degree. I was told that there are only three police constables between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of more than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and sparsely settled country, where a criminal would have comparatively little difficulty in making his escape. This remarkable absence of crime is due in large measure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquor within a certain distance of a public work, such as the building of a railway; in fact, the workman is debarred from intoxicants as rigorously as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities, and results have shown that they know what they are talking about. Not until the railway is completed and the construction gangs have moved on are the saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although this policy unquestionably makes for law and order, it is by no means popular with the workmen, who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name of town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and such a place is a hell of a fine town,” I was frequently assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!” Judged by this standard, Fort George, which is a division point on the Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers, and will unquestionably become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is a veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than its share of gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has vividly described it in a single couplet:

It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a Mecca for the dry of throat, who make bacchanalian pilgrimages from incredible distances to its bottle-decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on a jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred miles or more, can prevent him from gratifying his desires. Indeed, it is by no means unusual for a man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing up his job, to tramp a hundred miles through the wilderness to Fort George and blow every last cent of his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What a sudden falling off in intemperance there would be in a civilised community if a man had to walk a hundred miles to get a drink! What? Yet this proscription of alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the men, being denied what might be described as legal liquors, resort to innumerable more or less efficient substitutes. Red ink they will swallow with avidity, for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, and the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another popular refreshment is lemon extract, such as is commonly used in civilised households for flavouring jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, which is to all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage champagne is to all other wines, is a certain patent medicine which contains eighty per cent of pure alcohol. This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the construction camps as cocktails are in a New York club, both workmen and Indians pouring it down like water. It is warranted to cure all pains, and it does, for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the world for at least a day.

As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones, Fort George might truthfully be described as a very lively town. In one of its saloons twelve white-aproned individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful man with a cocked revolver on his knees; while mingling with the crowd in front of the bar are three bull-necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.” Instead of throwing a patron who becomes obstreperous into the street, however, in which case he would stagger to the saloon opposite and get rid of the balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,” where he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects of his debauch, after which he is ready to start in all over again. As a result of this ingenious system of conservation, very little money gets away.

These frontier communities have handled the perplexing problem of the social evil in a novel manner. The bedecked and bedizened women who follow in the wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs, instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within the town, are forced to reside in colonies of their own well without the municipal limits, sometimes half a dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who wishes to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend a considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, though I regret to add that this did not appear to act as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn trails that I saw in the Northland being those which led from the settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.

Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began to rain—not a sudden shower which comes and drenches and goes, but one of those steady, disheartening drizzles, which in this region sometimes last for a week. The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which had been atrocious from the moment we left the Fraser, quickly became worse. It was composed of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries, saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very sticky and very slippery material peculiar to British Columbia, known as “muskeg.” Though it looks substantial enough, with its top growth of stubble and moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of Virginia red clay, Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and New Orleans molasses. To make matters worse, a drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded us, so that the road, which was inconceivably bad under any circumstances, had been trampled into a black morass which no vehicle could by any possibility get through. There was only one thing for us to do and that was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst stretches of it. I have heard veterans of the Civil War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying roads for the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy, but I didn’t appreciate the truth of their remarks until I tried it myself. While camping in various parts of the world I had used an axe in a dilettante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping fire-wood, but there is a vast deal of difference between that sort of thing and cutting down enough trees to pave a road. In an hour our hands were so blistered that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating pain; but it was a question of corduroying that road or else abandoning the car and making our way to civilisation afoot through several hundred miles of forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance. At noon we paused long enough to light a fire and cook a meal of sorts, which we ate seated on logs amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting down and swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering about us. Five hours more of tree felling and we decided that our corduroy causeway was sufficiently solid to get over it with the car. As a matter of fact, we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that stage of exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t care what happened. If the car stuck in the mud, well and good. She could stay there and take root and sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing up so as to get a running start, our driver opened wide his throttle and the car tore at the stretch of home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck. Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s body were hurled a dozen feet away. The snapping of the limbs and the deafening explosions of the engines sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled and swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant I expected it to capsize; but our driver, clinging desperately to the wheel, contrived, with a skill in driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to tell it, we had traversed the morass we had spent an entire day in corduroying, and the car, trembling like a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground. The road over which we had passed looked as though it had been struck by a combined hurricane, cyclone, and tornado.

It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned by a Swede named Peter Rasmussen. What the man at Blackwater had described as “a swell place” consisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set down in the middle of a forest clearing. No smoke issued from the chimney, no dog barked a welcome, there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that no one was at home. Presently, however, we saw a fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon his shoulder, emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us across the pasture. I hailed him.

“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”

“Ay ban reckon ay am.”

“And can you put us up for the night?” I queried anxiously.

“Ay ban reckon ay can.”

A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in which Rasmussen and his single ranch-hand, a stolid and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked and ate and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by the light of a guttering candle was the bunk house. A bunk house, I might explain, is a building peculiar to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built against the wall. Here travellers may find a roof to shelter them and some hay on which to spread their blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted us when Rasmussen threw open the heavy door, this particular bunk house had evidently not been occupied for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, we found that the bunks were very much occupied indeed. But after Pete had started a roaring fire in the little sheet-iron stove and when we had spread our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound hay which served in lieu of mattresses and had scrubbed off some of the mud with which we were veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry ones, the complexion of things began to change from brunette to blonde. Between the intervals of corduroying the road in the morning, I had shot with my revolver half a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our way. They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we handed them over to Pete to pluck and cook for supper, which was still further eked out by a mess of lake trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region one may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the every-day necessities, such as salt and butter and bread, but he can surfeit himself on such luxuries as venison and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, like so many other settlers in British Columbia, had come from the American Northwest, lured by the glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial government. But he, like so many others, had found that the appalling cost of living had made it impossible, even with hay at a hundred dollars a ton, for him to clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he concluded, knocking the ashes from his pipe. And that’s precisely what a great many other discouraged Americans in western Canada are going to do.

For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s the road was rough, boggy, and exceedingly trying to the disposition, but it gradually improved until by the time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves running along a short stretch of road of which a New England board of supervisors need not have felt too much ashamed. The terrible condition of the roads throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely due to the fact that they run for great distances through dense forests where the sun cannot penetrate to dry them up; this, taken with the abnormally heavy rains, serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. At Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of some twoscore log cabins clustered about a mission church whose gaudy paint and bulging dome spoke of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the Russians. The interior tribes are known as “stick Indians,” referring, of course, to the fact that they dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to those living along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.” Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered moccasins sat sewing and gossiping before their cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their skins white or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world over; bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled like frisky puppies in the street; bearskins were stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear of every house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the Siwashes’ staple article of food. Though only one of the braves, who had been out into civilisation, had ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them seemed to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely enough, they became as shy as deer at sight of my camera, one picturesque old squaw refusing consecutive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and a dollar to come out from behind the door where she was hiding and let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter was willing enough to take a chance, however, for she offered to pose for as many pictures as we desired if we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn street of the village at a rattling clip, and she not only never turned a hair but asked me to go faster. Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would make a real road burner.

It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to Fort Fraser and the road proved a surprisingly good one. You must bear in mind, however, that when I speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, I am speaking comparatively. The best road we encountered would, if it existed in the United States, drive a board of highway commissioners out of office, while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community wouldn’t be considered a road at all—it would be used for a hog-wallow or for duck shooting. The mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name from the old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles from the town on the shores of Fraser Lake. When we were there the town consisted of half a hundred log and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five general stores, the branch of a Montreal bank, and the only hotel in the four hundred miles between Quesnel and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we were there, and was of particular interest to us because it represented a phase of civilisation which in our own country has long since passed, but now that the railway is in operation its picturesque log cabins will doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses with green blinds, the boards laid along the edge of the road will give way to cement sidewalks, and it will have street lamps and a town hall and its name displayed in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the station lawn and will look exactly like any one of a hundred other towns scattered along the transcontinental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall pass through it again, this time from the observation platform of a Pullman, and I shall remark quite nonchalantly to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes, I was up here in the good old days when this was nothing but a cluster of log huts at the Back of Beyond.”